The Next 50 Years of Computer Security

wbglinks writes "An informative interview with Linux guru Alan Cox, with an emphasis on Linux and security. Alan will be the keynote speaker at EuroOSCON this October." From the article: "It is beginning to improve, but at the moment computer security is rather basic and mostly reactive. Systems fail absolutely rather than degrade. We are still in a world where an attack like the slammer worm combined with a PC BIOS eraser or disk locking tool could wipe out half the PCs exposed to the internet in a few hours. In a sense we are fortunate that most attackers want to control and use systems they attack rather than destroy them."

Comments

50 years, eh?

[grub]

[...] at the moment computer security is rather basic and mostly reactive.

OpenBSD has been proactive since Day 1. And, really, can anyone speak authoritatively on computer issues 5 years in advance let alone 50?

If I drank a strong tea brewed from Theo de Raadt's toenail clippings I could glean knowledge from perhaps a couple of days in the future, but beyond that you're getting into the realm of Xenu.

Fortunate?

[Krast0r]

"In a sense we are fortunate that most attackers want to control and use systems they attack rather than destroy them." - however in a sense we are unfortunate that they generally take control of them to destroy someone elses computer, it just depends on how selfish you are.

'tis a pity...

[advocate_one]

We are still in a world where an attack like the slammer worm combined with a PC BIOS eraser or disk locking tool could wipe out half the PCs exposed to the internet in a few hours. In a sense we are fortunate that most attackers want to control and use systems they attack rather than destroy them.

cos if they actually destroyed them, then people would take proper care... apparently, it's quite normal for people to view their ms-windows boxes filling up with vermin etc. as just a fact of computer life... they only do something when they can't get online anymore... and then it now appears cheaper to buy a new box than get the damned thing fixed properly...

Problem

[mcc]

There are a large number of problems with your suggestion. I will outline only one.

One problem is that your suggestion is wholly founded on the assumption of computational resources being valuable. This is to an extent incisive, since you have realized that the reason why the formation of zombie networks has increasingly become the endgoal of worms and such is that there is commercial value in those networks' computational resources. But this breaks down when you start to think about what they use those computational resources for.

Computational resources, by themselves, aren't particularly valuable or hard to obtain; even bandwidth resources are beginning to become expendable if you're smart about how you use them. Your average PC is absolutely awash in power it doesn't need. 20 years of "your computer is obsolete as soon as you buy it" has crashed out into "your five-year-old computer technically isn't obsolete yet". People who used to buy supercomputers often now just buy cheap PCs and leash them together. Anybody who just has a legitimate need for a lot of computation these days can most easily obtain this through totally legitimate channels.

The reason why hackers, worm-builders, spyware peoples, etc obtain their resources through illegitimate means (like worms) is because they have illegitimate intents for those resources. They don't so much want 20% of the resources of a PC, they want 20% of the resources of a PC that can't be traced back to them. This is because once they have these resources, they're going to be using them for things like, warez. Sending spam without compliance with local laws. Hosting dubious and virus-like spyware. Extorting businesses for money in exchange for not launching DDOS attacks against them. If you willingly give these people 20% of your hard drive and CPU they aren't going to be using it for things like 3d rendering or protein folding; if that was all they wanted, they wouldn't need to be using hacker methods to get it in the first place.

Instead, if we go by your scenario, you'll give them 20% of your hard drive, CPU and bandwidth; they will protect you from the other hacker groups; everyone will be happy; ... and then six months later your computer will be part of a gigantic DDOS or some other illegal act so large it will attract the FBI's attention. From here there are two possibilities. Possibility one is, the people you've been contracting with here are a legitimate business, in which case the FBI will get their contact information from you and have them arrested. Possibility two is, the people you've been contracting with here are not a legitimate business, in which case the FBI will arrest you for conspiring with an organized crime group. We can assume no group even remotely competent enough to even get into this hypothetical security "protection" business in the first place would be stupid enough to let possibility one happen. This leaves possibility two. See the problem?

benevolent worm

[someone1234]

A worm which would spread fast like slammer and destroy infected machines after a short time is actually benevolent. It will destroy only machines that would otherwise be used as spam zombies. The day after the outbreak the internet would be clean again!